The movie, which also stars Tabu, Irrfan Khan and a magnificent tiger, pulls you in with really amazing visuals and, by the end, creates a heavenly collage in your mind that is way too difficult to erase

The recipe of theLife Of Piturned out to be way more scrumptious and interesting than the mouthful of brownie we had just before the movie started. For people who haven’t read the book, the film is going to be a treasure-trove of mystery and stimulating visuals, from scene one. Majestic animals cavorting in a massive zoo in picturesque Pondicherry, hippos wallowing in mud, flamingoes frolicking around fearlessly – now these scenes are sure to arrest your attention even if you aren’t a self-confessed nature or animal lover. The movie continues to look and feel surreal as Piscine Moliter Patel enters the frame, explaining the origin of his rather unusual name. Although he got his striking moniker from a divinely clean swimming pool in Paris, Pi ironically lands in deep murky water when his school friends very conveniently label him with a funny sobriquet: ‘Pissing’. Ayush Tandon, who plays the younger Pi in the film, comes up with a brilliant solution to change his situation, after which no one dares associate him with the Indian-style latrine, but with a mathematics legend in school instead.

There’s a moment in the film when Irrfan Khan says, ‘You don’t know the strength of your faith until it’s tested’. And the rest of the story revolves around the same principle. From the time the extremely talented Suraj Sharma deals with the scary and guttural roar of the magnificent Bengal tiger all alone on a humble raft to when he musters up the courage to feed that big cat a piece of meat just ‘coz he felt that the fierce animal wouldn’t harm him, Pi tests his faith at every given point of time.

Tabu looks amazingly South Indian in the film, and it is extremely amusing to see her motherly antennae hit alert mode, encouraging Pi to create his own beliefs, unlike her husband, who thinks it is best for his son to opt for a rational way of living.

The paradox is that that the movie is full of creative delights and still is a clean slate. The concept throws a number of elements at you and asks you to give your own interpretation to it. However, whatever analysis you may come up with, Ang Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s adventure-fantasy novel plays with the senses and tickles every imaginative nook and cranny of the mind. And the evidence rests in the vast sea, Pi’s undying hope, the tiger’s instincts, the dangerous hyena and a lot lot more…